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The world of Ilvakor WIP

So , this is probably my first map, well the more complex I have made for the moment. It was handraw at the begining, but I decided to scan it. I made only a little part this way , the rest was done with the help of my friend photoshop.

I made it for a campain held in D&D 3.5. It only one continent but my friend made another and there possibly another will be added , if there is enough place.

To be able to make to put it here I squezed the picture a little bit. My photoshop file is 250 mb, is this suppose to be big? But it include others thing as well , like the climate, coordinate and others stuff.

There is a couple of thing in my map that are not finished such as the:
- rivers (not finished)
- montains convered by tree and invisible
- cliffs missing and I am not sure what to put
and I think that all

Of course I am also working to put names of places and also the delimitations for the contry's.

I alredy made a map for the climate,language, races.
There aslo these for the density of population, and the altitude but they are not finish.

But I think I said enough, please tell me what do you think about my map.

That is, indeed, a plenty huge map. If it's going to be packed with information, though, that's just fine. 250 MB isn't too bad for an image this size, if your computer can handle it easily. My last map was about that big, and it had much smaller dimensions than this one.

I like that large river system including the lake in the center part of the continent, and the forest style is a nice change--it's neither symbolic nor an attempt to be photorealistic. It looks painted, which is good.

You need to do some cleanup on your coastlines. There are many places where you have forests growing out of the ocean, which needs to be fixed. I'd magic wand select the ocean, choose the forests layer, and simply delete. That'll do the job of erasing everything that's not over land. Same with the mountains, but you'll probably have to go in and manually clean up some of the symbols that get cut in half that way.

As regards the mountains, since your symbol is transparent, you need to be careful with overlapping them. It just doesn't look quite right to be able to see one mountain through another one.

Another comment on the mountains: I think you may be slightly exceeding the amount of scale-variation the symbols can endure without the line-weights becoming conspicuously different. Also, some of the larger ones look heavily upsampled ... depending on how you're achieving the scale variation (some kind of randomized brush, I'm assuming) you can prevent that by creating the brush at a higher resolution and only randomizing downward.

Hope that sounds helpful rather than finicky. It's a fine line sometimes.

...some of the larger ones look heavily upsampled ... depending on how you're achieving the scale variation (some kind of randomized brush, I'm assuming) you can prevent that by creating the brush at a higher resolution and only randomizing downward.

Also, as part of the coastal cleanup, you have some rivers that don't quite meet the mouth of the river, or go out into the ocean.

I also agree with the other comments about the mountains. I like the symbol that you used, but the overlap takes away from the effect some, as does the vastly different size between some of the symbols.

Still, it is a nice looking map overall. I like the way that you did the forests.

It's been a while, 5 years actually but I have not forgotten my map nor this community.My cartographer skill have increased I am sure so does my english, I hope. Sorry for not answering before.

I worked on and off on the map and other thing concerning my campaing world. I have lost some files including the one attached in the first post, that is how I know that I have made progress.
Oh the forest, very simplistic, they where doine with a normal round brush in photoshop with a small variation in colors. I do not remember using this. My new technique is very different.
About the scaling problem, the best thing would be to vectorize it in illustrator and then take it back to photoshop to pixelize it at a bigger size.

I tried different forest, hills, mountains styles over time but never finished the map because there are empty spots where I simply don't know what to put yet.

I am going to share different pictures so I might edit this post a couple of times or post another depending of situation.

here is a sample of mountains version 2 with the same brush set as version 1: Attachment 56384

These are the textures and colors I will be using on the map. This is a sample, an archipelago inspired by Japan but made using the photoshop negative cloud tool (or something like that). It served me well for testing purposes. Normally we are supposed to see the parchment texture under the land but I lost the original file (like many other thing).

Last edited by Azelor; 07-26-2013 at 11:08 AM.
Reason: image not showing

The sketchy mountains look pretty good, I don't know if you can lower their intensity without fading their outlines but they do come on a bit strong. Those tree's you had I thought were pictures of some sort of heavy cloth texture until I clicked on them. They look like a sort heavy denim or canvas weave in the thumbs, which is awesome. I wonder how they will turn out in practice on the map though. Could go good with those heavy mountains actually. Or it could all be too much. Or it could be sort of Klimt like which would be really cool to look at.

Without the climate and wind attachments that is all I got for you though.